Genesis 1-11 1850752745

Citation preview

GENESIS 1-11 J. Rogerson

Sheffield Academic Press

OLD

TESq'~NT

GUIDES

General Editor R.N. Whybray

GENESIS 1-11

First Published by JSOT Press 1991 Reprinted 1994, 1996 Copyright © 1991, 1994, 1996 Sheffield Academic Press Published by Sheffield Academic Press Ltd Mansion House 19 Kingfield Road Sheffield S119AS England

Printed on acid-free paper in Great Britain by The Cromwell Press Melksham, Wiltshire

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 1-85075-274-5

CONTENTS Preface Abbreviations Chapter 1 Genesis 1-11 in Context 1. Literary-critical readings with contemporary implications 2. Literary readings 3. Liberation readings 4 Feminist readings 5. Genesis 1-11 and ancient Near Eastern texts Chapter 2 Approaches to Genesis 1-11 1. Literary-critical readings with contemporary implications 2. Literary readings 3. Liberation readings 4. Feminist readings 5. Genesis 1-11 and ancient Near Eastern texts 6. Discu&sion and evaluation Chapter 3 Critical Issues 1. Myth

2. Genesis 1.1-3 3. 'Word' and 'deed' accounts and the translation of Genesis 1 4. The creation as 'good' 5. Creation as order . 6. One creation story or two? 7. One tree or two?

7 9 11

15 16 16 17 17 18 18 26 30 35 41 45 53 53 55 58 60 61 63 64

8. Genesis 3 and Ezekiel 28.11-19 9. Cain and Abel 10. Long-lived patriarch~ 11. Gods, women and giants 12. One Flood story or two? 13. Noah's drunkenness and Canaan's curse 14. The genealogies (Genesis 10) 15. The Tower of Babel 16. The date of Genesis 1-11 Further Reading Selected Bibliography Index of Biblical References Index of Authors

65 66 67 69 70 72 73

75 76 77 80 85 89

• PREFACE This Guide falls into two main sections. represented respectively by Chapters 2 and 3. Chapter 2 is concerned with the hermeneutical debate currently centred upon Genesis 1-11. Because these chapters have played such a formative role in theological discussion. it is not surprising that they should have assumed so much importance to interpreters who are concerned to relate the biblical text to modem issues. The interesting thing is that these interpreters represent mainstream international Old Testament scholarship. and are thus an indication of a new direction in which biblical studies are moving. Chapter 3 is a treatment of the text of Genesis 1-11 from the more familiar perspective of the historical-critical method. with particular attention to translation. source-critical and inter-literary questions. The aim of both chapters is to enable readers to engage closely with the biblical text. both at the level of larger. hermeneutical questions and at that of smaller. detailed points. I wish to record my thanks to my colleague David Clines for the loan of several books and for helpful suggestions and comments. and to Rosalind and Mandy for typing the manuscript.

ABBREVIATIONS

ANET

Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament (ed. J.B. Pritchard) BZAW Beihefte zur Zeitschrift fur die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft FRLANT Forschungen zur Religion und Literatur des Alten und Neuen Testaments GNB Good News Bible HTR Haruard Theological Reuiew JBL Journal of Biblical Literature Journal for the Study of the Old Testament JSOT Journal for the Study of the Old Testament JSOTS Supplement Series Journal of Theological Studies JIS New English Bible NEB Revised English Bible REB Revised Standard Version RSV Vetus Testamentum VT WMANT Wissenschaftliche Monographien zum Alten und Neuen Testament Zeitschrift fur die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft ZAW Zeitschrift fur Theologie und Kirche ZTK

1 GENESIS 1-11 IN CONTEXT the main concern of biblical A scholarship was to reconcile Genesis 1-11 with the HUNDRED YEARS AGO,

scientific discoveries of the nineteenth century. In the 1970s and 1980s its main concern has been to interpret Genesis 1-11 in the light of liberation theology, feminist theology and the ecological crisis. This statement may surprise readers for several reasons. First, many church-goers, while not taking Genesis literally, believe that the Bible gives us information about the origin and purpose of the universe. Does modem scholarship have nothing to say about this? Many schools and college courses, not to mention their textbooks, interpret Genesis 1-11 in the light of the ancient Near Eastern background. They study the meaning of 'myth' and they compare Genesis 1-11 with parallel texts from ancient Mesopotamia. What has happened to this approach in recent academic study? Some readers will find it hard to believe that academic biblical scholars are being influenced by such things as liberation theology or the ecological crisis. They may go further and say that for scholars to have such interests is to betray the integrity of academic study. The purpose of this first chapter is to sketch the movement of interpretation from its concern with science 100 years ago, through its attention to the ancient Near Eastern background, to the present engagement with contemporary issues. This will introduce the very ~mplex situation that exists at present in the interpretation of Genesis 1-11, and it will also show that, basically, scholars today are doing what all scholars have done

12

Genesis 1-11

in the past hundred years: they are interpreting the text from their own situation or context.

Genesis 1-11 and science \ ., The exploration of the world by sailors in the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries indicated that Genesis 10 could no longer be regarded as an authoritative account of the geographical disposition of the world and its peoples. However, at the beginning of the nineteenth century it was still generally believed that Genesis 1 could be shown to be in perfect harmony with scientific discoveries, and that Genesis 2-3 was a true story about the earliest ancestors of the human race. Calvin's view, that Genesis 1 was an account of the creation from the standpoint of a Hebrew observer and not a modern scientific account (Calvin 1965, pp. 79, 86), was overlooked. Scientific discoveries in the form of the geology of the 1820s and 1830s.and Darwin's theory of natural selection (1859 and 1870) challenged the early chapters of Genesis on two points. First, the world was seen to be many thousands (sic) of years old, as against one influential reconstruction of the biblical chronology which yielded a figure of 4004 BCE for the creation of the world. However, this was not too damaging. It was possible to understand the six days of creation as six eras, as had been done by interpreters for many centuries. The implications of Darwin's theories were more disturbing, for they directly contradicted the biblical account. Whereas the latter told the story of the creation of the first human beings by God, and of their fall from a state of paradise to the hard conditions of the ancient' world, the theory of evolution required that the human race had developed from lower forms of life, and that its history was one of uninterrupted progress. As the nineteenth century came to an end, the attempt of critical, theological scholarship to interpret Genesis in the light of scientific discovery was exemplified by S.R. Driver (cf. Rogerson 1984, pp. 282-23). He put forward the proposal that the Bible has an outer and an inner sense. Its outer sense was its narrative form, expressed in terms of the ideas and language of the ancient world. Its inner sense was a revealed truth which criticism of the outer sense could in no way affect. Driver reconciled Genesis 3 to the theory of evolution by assuming that

1, Genesis 1-11 in Context

13

the human race or its separate branches had been faced with a moral choice that would affect its future, and that the wrong choice was made (Driver 1904, pp. 56-57), •

I

Genesis 1-11 and the ancient Near East Driver was interpreting Genesis 1-11 from his standpoint as a churchman and a critical scholar; we may call this standpoint his context. Even as he worked, the context for the study of Genesis 1-11 was changing. The change resulted from the discovery and decipherment of original texts from ancient Mesopotamia beginning from the late 1840s. . Biblical scholars had long known from writers of Greek antiquity that the Babylonians possessed creation stories similar in some respects to that in Genesis 1. They regarded these stories as dependent on that found in Genesis. But from 1876 newly discovered Babylonian accounts of creation began to be published (see Delano 1985, pp. 52ff.), and the view began to emerge that Genesis 1 was dependent on the Babylonian accounts and not vice versa. Further, in 1872 the discovery of a Babylonian version of the flood had been announced. A new context for the interpretation of Genesis 1-11 began to emerge, a context in which these chapters were no longer seen as the beginning of a sacred, inspired book, the Bible. Instead, they were seen as ancient Hebrew narratives similar to other narratives from the ancient world about cosmic and human origins. If the task of Driver had been to interpret Genesis 1-11 for Christian faith, the task of interpretation in the new context was to discover how ancient Israel had used traditions from the ancient world to express its distinctive faith. Thus in the new context the concern was with the beliefs of Israel's official religion. It remained for theologians to make of this what they could for contemporary Christian belief. Within the context of the view that the stories of Genesis III were Israelite versions of ancient traditions, several positions emerged. Three of these may be mentioned. At one extreme, it was argued that the alleged dependence of Genesis on Babylonian traditions robbed Genesis of any claim to authority for Christian believers (Delitzsch, 1903). At the other extreme, some scholars in Britain and Scandinavia found in Genesis 1 a link with the New Testament teaching about

14

Genesis 1-11

death and resurrection, arguing that it was a liturgy used at the New Year festival when the Israelite kings suffered ritual death and resurrection. This pattern of death and resurrection was also held to be present"n the 'Psalms and in !sa. 52.1353.12, making possible a link between the suffering, royal Messiah of the Old Testament and the crucified and risen Messiah of the New Testament (Bentzen, 1970). A different viewpoint was that exemplified by the German scholar von Rad (in Anderson 1984, pp. 53-64). Von Rad held that Israel took over the idea of creation from its neighbours in the ancient world quite late in its religious development, and that the salvation of Israel in the exodus event was more fundamental to Israelite belief than faith in creation. The effect of this position was to shift attention away from Genesis 1-11 and to emphasize the traditions about God's electio~ and salvation of Israel. Israel knew its God first as redeemer and only· later came to confess that he was Lord of the universe. . A new context A feature of Old Testament studies in the last twenty years has been a growth in the number of methods applied to its interpretation. Many of these methods have come from other disciplines. Old Testament scholars have, for example, taken over from modem literary theory, sociology and social anthropology such approaches as structuralism, close reading and a renewed interest in the social background to the Bible. Some of these methods have been applied to Genesis 1-11. At the same time, there has been a new regard for the authority of Genesis 1-11, even if this has sometimes been in a backhanded sort of way. For example, some feminist theologians have argued that the interpretation of Genesis 3 in terms of female subordination to males is a distortion of the true meaning of the text. As will be outlined later, they have argued for an interpretation that stresses the equality or complementarity of the sexes; and in so doing they have implicitly asserted the authority of Genesis 3 for Christian practice. On the other hand, more radical feminists have used the biblical text in order to penetrate behind it to discover a suppressed women's history with which they can identify themselves. This rejection of the surface meaning of the text has been a back-handed

1. Genesis 1-11 in Context

15

acknowledgment of its authority, at least for a male-oriented Church and society. Similarly, liberation theology has either re-asserted the authority of the text looked at from a liberation perspective, or has rejected its surface meaning in a search for the history of the oppressed. The present context in which Genesis 1-11 is being interpreted is thus characterized by two features: a growth in the number of methods applied to the study of these chapters, and a renewed interest in the relevance of Genesis 1-11 for such questions as the rights of the oppressed and poor, the status of women and the ecological crisis. In the case of.the last of these, Old Testament study has been responding to those ecologists who have argued that the command to humanity in Gen. 1.26ft: to subdue the earth is the cause of the crisis that we face. In becoming sensitive to some or all of these issues, academic biblical studies have been moving into a new context, a context that has affected the interpretation of Genesis 1-11 as profoundly as the discovery of Babylonian texts affected interpretation at the end of the nineteenth century. One difference between the present context and previous contexts is the greater diversity of methods and approaches that characterizes the present situation. To conclude this chapter, an attempt will be made to summarize these. This summary will then form the basis for a more detailed exposition in the next chapter. Full references are given in the next chapter to the works briefly mentioned here. 1. Literary-critical readings with contemporary implications

The work of Catholic scholars such as Lohfink, Beauchamp and Zenger has concentrated upon those parts of Genesis 1-11 traditionally assigned to the Priestly source of the Pentateuch. The conclusions of these scholars have, however, been of greatest interest in the light of the current concern with ecological matters. Lohfink, taking up a suggestion first made by McEvenue, has argued that P is written from a 'pacifist' standpoint, and that this must affect the interpretation of passages such as Gen. 1.2611'. regarding the human domination of the world. Lohfink argues that Gen. 1.26ft: gives no sanction to domination and exploitation. Beauchamp's discussion deals

16

Genesis 1-11

with human relations with the animal creation, while Zenger, in his discUssion of the 'bow' in Gen. 9.13 explicitly addresses ecological questions in a work which is a detailed example of traditional literary criticism.' ., 2. Literary readinp

Literary readings are of various kinds. They may be concerned with the whole of Genesis 1-11 or only with parts of it; and they may be either thematic or structuralist. Clines applies the concept of 'theme' to Ge'nesis 1-11, arguing that the content of the chapters can be described in two ways: a. humankind's tendency to destroy what God has made good, b. God's ability to overcome humanity's destructive tendencies. He opts for the latter theme in the light of the Pentateuch as a whole. Structuralist readings of Genesis 2-3 occupied a whole issue of Semeia in 1980 (Patte, 1980). The various contributors were agreed in regarding the text as mysterious and multilayered, and their aim was to make some of this depth apparent. Jobling used the opposing categories of inside/outside to illumine the text. Literary readings differ from other approaches in being ahistorical. Whereas Lohfink, for example, locates the P source in a specific historical setting, literary interpreters are concerned with the inner dynamics of the text itself, and not necessarily with reference to reality outside the text. 3. Liberation readinga

At least three approaches can be distinguished here. The first, exemplified by scholars such as Louise Schottroff and Wittenberg, is essentially historical-critical, but with a different emphasis f~m that of Lohfink and his colleagues. The latter deal much more closely with the details of the text. Schottroff and Wittenberg gain their impetus more from what they presume the social background to have been than from the text itself. Thus Wittenberg regards the Yahwist source (J) as antiSolomonic propaganda and sees in Genesis 3 and in Genesis 11 a condemnation of Solomon's wisdom and of his building activities. Mosala also sets out from historical-critical recon-

1. Genesis 1-11 in Context

17

structions of the setting of texts, but is more interested in what the text conceals than in what it says. Historical criticism is used by Mosala to recover a lost history of the oppressed. Boesak's liberation reading' of Genesis 4 is an existential reading that takes the nan:ative about Cain and Abel as a story with universal application. ':

4. Feminist readings Two different approaches can be noted here. Trible, in her classic God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, us~s an essentially literary approach; yet this has a specific purpose, which is not simply to explore the dimensions of Genesis 2-3 for their own sake, but to argue a feminist case. Myers uses the latest research on the sociology of women in Israelite highland agriculture as the key to understanding Genesis 2-3. 5. Genesis 1-11 and ancient Near Eastern texts This section comes last deliberately. It would be wrong to suggest that scholars no longer interpret Genesis 1-11 against the ancient Near Eastem background. On the other hand, this has become only one of many possible approaches, and it is sometimes used by writers who fall into the categories earlier mentioned in this chapter. While it is valuable in providing a contrast between the faith of Israel and that of Israel's neighbours, it does not provide an obvious link with contemporary problems. The approaches just outlined will now receive detailed attention.

2 APPROACHES TO GENESIS 1-11 1. Literary-eritica1 readings with contemporary implications

studies of the Priestly source of the I Pentateuch or,detailed more exactly, what he calls pc (the Priestly N A SERIES OF

historical narrative: the 'g stands for the German Geschichtserzahlung, which means historical narrative), N. Lohfink has suggested some striking interpretations of parts of Genesis 111. He believes that pc was composed toward the end of the exile, and was intended to present an account of Israel's history deliberately different from the Yahwist's history and the Deuteronomic history (Lohfink 1983, pp. 55-56). The writer of pi wished Israel to be a temple-based community centred upon the presence of God and governed by sacred rituals and sacrifices in such a way that no one would exercise power over others. The frictions and stresses within the society that would normally leaq to bloodshed were to be removed by the use of sacrifice to restore-the broken relationships. pi rejected the .notion of war, a fact indicated, according to Lohfink, by its treatment of the exodus and of the mode of possession by the Israelites of the land of Canaan. Whereas J and D indicate a military defeat of Egypt and a warlike occupation of Canaan, pi has no account of Egypt's military demise at the exodus, describes Israel as a sacral and not a military body in the wilderness, and represents the occupation of Canaan as the peaceful setting up of God's sanctuary in the land. (See Lohfink 1982, pp. 194-99 for an account in English of some of these points.)

2. Approaches to Genesis 1-11

19

Seen in the light of the whole ofF', those parts of this source that are found in Genesis 1-11 have a clear message. It is noteworthy, first, that in Gen. 1.26-30 humankind is not given permission to eat meat. THis permission comes only after the flood, at Gen. 9.3-4. According to Lohfink the ideal implied in Gen. 1.26-30 is that humans will not exercise force over the animal creation. However, in the view of P', humankind did not hold to this ideal, and this was why God brought the flood upon the earth. The situation after the flood is a compromise. Humans are given permission to eat meat; but this is not a mandate for the exploitation of animals. The reason for the permission to eat meat is that Israel can offer to God the sacrifices that will enable order to be maintained in a sacral, oppression-free community. Lohfink also argues strongly that the Hebrew verb radd in Gen. 1.28, usually rendered 'to have dominion over', has the basic sense of 'to wander around'. Its semantic field includes 'accompany', 'pasture', 'guide', 'lead', 'rule' and 'command', from which it is clear that its meaning of 'to rule' has to be understood in the context of shepherding. Thus the task given to humanity in Gen. 1.28 in relation to the rest of the created order is to be a shepherd (Lohfink 1977, pp. 167-68; English in Lohfink 1982, pp. 178-79). With regard to the command to be fruitful and multiply, Lohfink argues that in the light ofF' as a whole this must be taken as a command limited to the establishment of the families of the earth and of their possession of their own lands. The command has nothing to do with the modem notion of continuous growth: There was once growth; not, there must always be growth. The goal of growth was simply that the nations would come from the original families. Th~y now exist; and as a result the blessing of growth has achieved its goal (Lohfink 1977, p. 185 my translation; see also Lohfink 1982, p. 196 for an English version).

Lohfink's treatment of parts of Genesis 1-11 anchors these texts firmly in the situation of post-exilic Israel. Genesis 1 becomes a prophetic text, depicting an ideal which no longer exists: an ideal of human society in which there is no war, and no exploitation of the created order, and in which human responsibility is to act as a shepherd to the created order.

20

Genesis 1-11

However. the picture presented by pi. although a compromise with the violent realities of human nature. is nonetheless an attempt to create an oppression-free society based upon sacral institutions. Although Lohftnk does not draw conclusions from this about how we should order the world today. his exegesis rules out interpretations which are commonly heard today: e.g. that Genesis 1-11 teaches us that we live in a world created by God which he has described as 'good'; or that Genesis 1 is responsible for the human exploitation of the natural world. (This last charge could be true. of course. if misinterpretations of Gen. 1.28 had been responsible.) It is likely that Lohfink's suggestions will strike a chord with many modern readers; and the implications of this will be discussed elsewhere in this book. For the moment. it is sufficient to observe that the questions to which Lohfink is sensitive are questions relevant to the end of the twentieth century. and indicate how the contemporary situation can interact with work of a rigorous literary-critical nature. Beauchamp (1987. pp. 139-82). in a complex and subtle essay. follows Lohfink in some respects; but his essay concentrates upon the tension between Gen. 1.26-30 and Gen. 9.1-7; and to that extent it avoids the criticism that he is interpreting not the text of Genesis 1-11 but sources that have been hypothetically isolated by scholars. The differences between Gen. 1.26-30 and Gen. 9.1-7 are that. in the former. humans are not permitted to eat animals. whereas in the latter. not only is this permission given. but language is used about the relation between humans and animals that implies a significant increase in human domination. Gen. 9.2 says that the fear of humankind shall be upon every beast of the earth. etc., and that they will be delivered into the hand (or power) of human beings. This last phrase is one which is used elsewhere in the Old Testament to describe God's giving victory over his enemies. But not only does Gen. 9.1-7 envisage the human consumption of animals; it envisages the killing of human beings by human beings, and it seeks to restrict such killing by allowing the execution of murderers. on the grounds that humankind is made in God's image. Beauchamp argues that in these two texts (and elsewhere in the Old Testament) the animals act as a sign indicating the

, 2. Approaches to Genesis 1-11

21

nature of humanity, and humankind's relationship to the created order. The regime of Gen. 1.26-30 does not propose vegetarianism for its own sake. The vegetarianism helps to define what it means to·say that humanity is made in God's image; for this language is about relationships with the animals, as is evident from Gen. 1.26, 'Let us make .. .in our image ... and let them have dominion .. .' This dominion is characterized by tenderness towards the animals, and since no animal blood is to be shed by human beings, it is also implied that humans do not shed each other's blood and that animals do not shed that of other animals (cf. 1.30). ~at is implied in Gen. 1.26-30 is elaborated in Gen. 9.1-7, in the changed circumstances of the post-flood world. In place of tenderness towards animals on the part of humanity there is now warlike domination. If the animals experienced tenderness in Gen. 1.26-30 they now experience fear and dread (9.2). It is implied that animals :will seek to kill human beings (v. 5b) and so each other, and that human beings will be like animals in that regard. The only difference will be that the extent of human beings' killing each other will be limited by the right of execution of murderers. This is because humankind is created in, God's image. From the contrast between Gen. 1.26-30 and 9.1-7 it is clear, in Beauchamp'S view, that mankind is no longer in the image of God as defined in Genesis 1. Humanity's relationship to animals has changed from that of tenderness to that of domination; from that of the shepherd to the hunter. Humans have become more like the animals, not only through murders and war, but through the enslavement of human by human. Thus Gen. 1.26-30 is a text expressing an ideal: . It is able to believe that a mastery over the earth is possible without exercising a mastery over the other beings, who are intermediate beings between the master and the earth. Genesis 1 teaches us that there is only true mastery over the earth if mankind does not enslave itself by enslaving its fellows (p. 170).

As such, it has much in common with prophetic texts that see a new creation as including peace between the animals and between the animals and humanity (see Isa. 65.17-25).

22

Genesis 1-11 The Bible does not think of peace between human beings without peace between human and animal (p. 180).

Beauchamp's stress on hU{IUln relations with animals as an important sign enables him to make other illuminating comparisons. For example, in Lev. 26.21-22 one of the penalties for disobedience on the part of Israel is that God will bring wild animals to devour their crops and their children. Thus, animals will be a sign of disobedience and judgment. In Genesis 10, those parts belonging to pil' and containing the words, 'by their families, languages, their land~ and their nations' (vv. 5, 20, 31), suggest a differentiation of the human race into an equivalent of the species (kinds) that characterize the animals; if so, the greater stress on the (violent) animal constituent of humankind after the flood is indicated. Like that of Lohfink, Beauchamp's exposition is firmly anchored in what he believes parts of Genesis 1-11 meant to the Priestly circles who· were revising the outlook of Israel's earlier traditions; and again, it is one which is bound to be read with sympathy in our contemporary world. For while there is no reason why we should give precedence to the viewpoint of pil' over against that of other strands of the Old Testament. we are strongly tempted to do so by our modern concerns. and we are once again entitled to conclude that these concerns have not been without influence upon Beauchamp's work. An interesting feature of Zenger's detailed and subtle monograph (Zenger. 1983) is the fact that he mentions the current ecological crisis several times at the beginning of his work, and devotes a brief concluding section to 'some ecological-theological implications' (pp. 179-83). Here is another work of traditionalliterary-critical study which is explicitly sensitive to an important modern issue. There are many similarities between Zenger's approach and those of Lohfink and Beauchamp. Like Lohfink, Zenger assigns parts of Genesis 1-11 to the Priestly narrative (Pf:) and interprets these in the light of his view of the narrative as a whole. Like Beauchamp, he sees the relation between Gen. 1.26-30 and 9.1-3, 7 as B. crucial issue in interpretation. However, he disagrees with Lohfink about the extent of pg and, against Beauchamp, regards 9.4-6 as a later addition to pg.

2. Approaches to Genesis 1-11

23

Zenger accepts the view proposed by Wellhausen, and supported by 'the majority of recent publications' (p. 41) that pc ends at Deut. 34.7-9, that is, with the death of Moses. This enables him to argue that three figures are crucial in PcAdam, Abraham and Mose~nd that pi is to be divided into two main parts, Gen. 1.1 to Exod. 1.7 and Exod. 1.13 to Deut. 34.9. Although he has a different view from Lohfink and others about the importance of the occupation of the land of Canaan in pc (Lohfink sees Josh. 19.41 as the ending of pif), Zengers conclusions have much in common with those of Lohfink: plr is the programmatic outline fDr a non-political Israel, which regards the gift of a communal experience of God's nearness as the most important of all benefits, rather than being a state and having its own land. As such, Fir does not attempt to present a detailed and realizable constitution, such as is found in Ezekiel 4()-48. It is a basic reflection on the presupposition and purpose of a new manifestatiDn Df Israel, that is to become the medium Df the mighty activity Df the creator God whD gives life (pp. 45-46).

Written towards the end of the sixth century, probably in Babylon (although Jerusalem remains a possibility), pc offers to the community the chance to realize, in its religious life, its status as a community fulfilling the purpose of the creation. This was once upon a time achieved in the period from Abraham to Sinai, and the status of the community, as being in life-giving relationship to Yahweh, was embodied in the Sinai covenant. Thereafter, the history of Israel was a history of failure to become, in the promised land, what it had been. However, this history of sin and failure did not threaten the creation, because God had already made the created order so secure that it could not be threatened. This view of the purpose of pi brings us to one of the central claims that Zenger makes about those parts of Genesis 1-11 that belong to pg. Discussing the relation between the creation and flood stories and between Gen. 1.26-30 and 9.1-3, 7, he argues that both, taken together, constitute the account of creation as it impinged upon the world of pg. He does not deny that there are differences between these passages. Gen. 1.26 describes a shepherd-like function for humankind which is strengthened after the flood. Also, the flood to some extent

24

Genesis 1-11

damages the earth as long as the waters remain. There is a new 'realism' after the flood. one which recognizes that the world contains violence and Jnjustice. Yet. when all this has been allowed. Zenger's emphasis is more upon continuity than discontinuity. Even if the world implied in Gen. 1.26-30 alone no longer exists, if it ever did. the world implied, in Genesis 1 and Gen. 9.1-3. 7 taken together does exist, and offers to Israel the hope of life lived in close relationship with the creator God. After the flood. there is not a new creation of the world. but rath~r. the beginning of a new era for a purified world. It is at this· point that we must consider Zenger's treatment of Gen. 9.1-3. 7 and of the bow in the clouds which God promises to set (9.13). He begins by noting that the language of9.2-'the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth'-is not the language of war, but that of God's gift of the land of Canaan to his people (Exod. 23.27ff., 'I will send my terror before you ... I will drive them out from before you'). Gen. 9.1-3 therefore adds to the idea of Gen. I.26fT. the idea that humankind must shepherd the animals: that is, it imposes the additional charge to be the lord of the created order, in other words, so to rule over it that the weaker and threatened animals will be protected. Gen. 9.13. then, does not abolish Gen. I.26ft'. but strengthens it. The bow in the clouds is not a sign of peace and reconciliation but a sign that over and above humanity stands the protector of the created order: the creator God who will protect his creation from all that would destroy it. Zenger points out that, in the Old Testament, it is a broken bow that is the sign of peace (Ps. 46.9; Zech. 9.10). This does not compromise the 'pacifist' .nature of pi. The bow is not a summons to war or a justification of it. Rather, it is a call to trust in the determination and ability of God to safeguard his creation. In the concluding section on ecological implications. Zenger makes the following points. For pi the history of Israel is inseparable from the story of creation, as is also the history of the Church. What God does in order to redeem his people is part of what he is doing to preserve the life of his creation. Thus humanity is an integral part of creation in the sense that humankind 'either survives with the created order by living in harmony with it. or goes under with the Created order by liv-

2. Approaches to Genesis 1-11

25

ing against it' (p. 179). Second, humanity is given responsibility for the created order and is answerable to the creator God. This answerability, according to pi, is to be established by Israel's building of a sanctuary where the creator God will reveal himself to humankind. The people of God is called to live an exemplary life in this regard, so that the earth will be a place onife for all that lives. To the extent that humans destroy the earth as a place of life, they lose their humanity: A human race that regards the earth as material tor satisfying its own needs, that uses animals as creatures without rights, that makes power the criterion for decisions {and only reflects later on the morality of what has been done}, that produces weapons that can destroy the ecological balance of the world completely-such a human race is acting contrary to creation and is on the way to becoming the 'aU flesh' (which had 'corrupted its way') of which Genesis 6.12 speaks (p. l80).

The bow in the sky, then, is a sign of hope to a suffering world, witnessing to the royal sovereignty over the earth of the creatorGod. Zenger's final point stems from his views about the tent sanctuary whose construction pi describes (Exod. 25ff.) as a place where God meets his people in their worship on the seventh day. The stone-built temples of Solomon and the ancient world were symbols of political might and of the oppression of the poorer classes. The cult to be celebrated in the tent (Lev. 9) is neither the state cult of Solomon, which legitimized power, nor the priestly dominated orgiastic cult of Canaan and Egypt. In both cases, the priestly cult degraded the participation of the people. What is envisaged by pg is a cult for the whole community, whose sacrificial offerings are a thankful rendering to the creator God of what he has given to his people. For the modern world, this indicates responsibility for creation flowing from a common life rooted in worship and centred on the meaning of creation, which consideration becomes the criterion for the ordering of daily life. We shall return to Zenger's rich monograph in other sections of the book. This summary has been restricted to the treatment of Genesis 1-11 and to the ecological implications.

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Genesis 1-11 2. Literary readings

Literary readings' of Genesis 1-11 differ from the literarycritical readings that we hate beerl considering in at least two ways. First, they ignore the sources that are presupposed by literary-critical approaches; second, they hold that the important thing about the narratives is not their presumed setting in a particular period of Israelite history, but their internal dynamics of plot, characterization and theme. Although doubt continues to be expressed about the possibility or propriety of dividing Genesis 1-11 into sources, the attempt to do so is not without good grounds. Leaving aside the striking differences between the use of the divine name in Gen. 1.1-2.4a and 2.4b-3.24 we may note two apparent contradictions. If Gen. 1.26-30 does not allow human beings to kill animals, why does Abel offer sheep as a sacrifice to God, and why does God accept the sacrifice (4.4)? If the human race was not divided into nations and scattered abroad speaking different languages until after the building of the tower of Babel (11.19). why do 10.5, 20 and 31 speak of the languages and lands of the various peoples listed? Two possible answers can be given by those reading the final form of the text in a literary way. First, Gen. 1.26-30 may have to be read in the light of 4.4, with the conclusion that the former text does not, at the very least, exclude killing animals in order to sacrifice them. Second. the apparently contradictory arrangement of Genesis 10-11 may be of significance for the interpretation of the whole (see below). The strength of the second answer, which gives preference to the'text as B whole as opposed to trying to divide it into sources in order to remove contradictions, is that source division is always bound to be hypothetical, whereas the final form of the text is a reality. Of the various possible literary readings this section will deal with those of Clines (1978) and Jobling (1980). In the course of his study of the 'theme' of the Pentateuch, Clines considers the question of what might be said to be the 'theme' of Genesis Ill. Drawing upon the work of standard commentators such as von Rad and Westermann, Clines considers several possible themes. The first is a sin-speech-mitigation-punishment theme. He shows that in each of five episodes, those of the fall

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(ch. 3), Cain and Abel (ch. 4), the sons of God (6.1-4), the flood (6.5-7.24), and the tower of Babel (11.1-9), before God punishes the evildoers there.isp divine speech and a mitigation of the punishment before the punishment is administered. Thus, in 3.21 God clothes the humans with skins following his speech in 3.14-19 and prior to driving Adam and Eve from the garden in 3.22-24~ In ch. 4, God puts a protecting mark upon Cain (v. 15) following his speech in vv. 10-11 and Cain's departure to the land of Nod in v. 16. In the flood story we are told that Noah found favour in God's eyes (6.8) following God's speech announcing judgment in 6.6-7. The tower of Babel is an interesting case, because Clines implies that the mitigation is in 10.1-32, i.e. that it precedes the tower of Babel story (p. 63); and later (p. 68) he argues that, if 10.1-32 were placed after 11.1-9, the passage would have to be read under the sign of judgment rather than as a fulfilment of the renewed command of 9.1 to be fruitful and mUltiply. This illustrates how a literary approach deals with the problem on which source critics base their detection of sources. Clines· rejects the sin-speech-mitigation-punishment scheme as the overall 'theme' of Genesis 1-11, because it cannot include the creation or the genealogies. Rather Clines accepts that it is a recurrent motif. He next tries a spread of sin, spread of grace theme. This draws attention to the way in which wrongdoing escalates from the sin of Adam and Eve through the violence of Cain and Lamech to the generation destroyed by the flood; and after the flood there is an escalation from Noah's family to the building of the tower of Babel. In each case, God responds graciously. God does not kill Adam and Eve, he puts he a protecting mark upon Cain and he commands Noah to build an ark. The. sequel to the tower of Babel is the growth of the nations (10.1-32), which account comes before the tower of Babel story so as to be seen as a sign of grace. Clines also incorporates the creation narrative and the genealogies by arguing that the former E:)q)resses a series of gracious acts which balance the pessimism of some of the subsequent narratives; and that the genealogies, by emphasizing the continual presence of death, imply also God's grace which enables life to continue.

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Clines then explores a further possible theme, that of creation-uncreation-recreation. He notes that, in the flood story, some of the boundaries fixe~ in Genesis 1 are removed in order to allow the waters to cover the earth. The flood is finally restrained by the re-imposition of the boundaries. This approach then yields the suggestion that the flood story is only the cUlmination of a process of undoing of the creation which is discernible in chs. 3-6. After the flood, the process of uncreation begins again, as the narrative moves through the strife within Noah's family to the dispers\on of the human race after the building of the tower of Babel. The combination of the sin and grace theme with the creation, uncreation theme enables Clines to propose as the most comprehensive theme that of the unfailing grace of God in the face of human sin, even when that sin brings the creation to the brink of uncreation. Clines's literary reading yields many insights. It is also noteworthy that it is explicitly theological and not related to modern problems as are the modem readings outlined in the previous section. Indeed, Clines goes out of his way to emphasize that a literary reading offers the text as story: What is offered in the story is a 'world'-make-believe or real, familiar or unfamiliar. To the degree that the hearer or reader of the story is imaginatively seized by the story, to that degree he or she 'enters' the world of the story. That means that the reader of the story, when powerfully affected by it, becomes a participant of its world. One learns, by familiarity with the story, one's way about its world until it becomes one's own world too (p. 102).

And again: • The Pentateuch becomes ... a source of life, not by being fed through some hermeneutical machine that prints out contemporary answers to contemporary questions, but through the reader's patient engagement with the text and openness to being seized, challenged, or threatened by the 'world' it lays bare (p.llS).

Clines discusses ~otifs that are apparent on the surface of the text of Genesis 1-11, and seeks to find an organizing principle that would encompass their interrelation and their potential for development. Structuralist readings are more concerned with levels of meaning below the surface; however,

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when these levels are described, they inevitably affect our appreciation of what is going on at the surface level. In the 1980 Semeia sy~ppsium on Genesis 2-3, Jobling proposes the opposition of inside/outside as a clue to the semantics of the passage. The story begins with God's introducing the man (from outside) into the garden, and ends with the human beings outside the garden. The story takes place inside the garden, but to be inside the garden is to be in an almost dangerous situation. It contains a serpent who is a source of temptation as well as trees whose prohibition is a potential source of danger. Life inside the garden differs greatly from that outside. Inside the garden, agriculture is easy, but it is the only occupation. If the garden contains animals, these are not bred or used by the man. Although he has a female companion there is no other society; neither is there sexual awareness or sexual reproduction. Although inside there is immortality, it is an immortality of a non-societal monochrome variety. All this is in contrast with the outside, the world familiar to human beings, with difficult agriculture, but with husbandry and hunting in addition to agriculture and a larger society based upon sexual awareness and procreation. According to this reading the story functions to enable men to cope with women and with the harshness of agricultural life. Men may face hard work and death and may yearn for immortality and ease. But these latter ideals, when available to the first man in the garden of Eden, were not without danger and disadvantage. Woman plays a complex role in the story. Created out of the man's rib to provide the companionship no animal could provide, she nonetheless pursues independent action, until she becomes largely responsible for man's being outside the garden. She is thus p~rt of man, but enables man to argue that expulsion from the garden was not his fault. The story enables man both to long for the lost life of the garden, and to prefer the realities of his present existence. Although this type of analysis is based wholly upon the text, it does refer to realities outside the text, namely, human awareness of the contradiction between dream and reality. It assumes a setting in a non-specified Israelite or even universal human situation, it does not provide theological truths and it is male-orientated as are some of the other structuralist read-

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Genesis 1-11

ings, although this does not mean that such approaches are necessarily sexist. Yet it enables readers to see the text in 'new ways, and indicates how difficult it is to exhaust a text of its possibilities of meaning. 3. Liberation readinglrI

Liberation readings of the Bible take a number of forms. Some are literary-critical readings which describe situations in the life of.ancient Israel, but which atte:m,pt an application to modern situations. Others simply use the historical situation in Israel to establish common ground between the Old Testament situations and modem conditions, and assume that the biblical text can then address the modem conditions directly. Another approach assumes the unitariness of human nature, so that the biblical narrative has universal application. Finally, there is the approach that goes behind the text to discover a suppressed history of oppressed people. Wittenberg (1988) dates the J parts of Genesis 2-11 to the Solomonic era, and sees the J work as part of a theological critique of Solomon's reign. He notes that various scholars have detected royal motifs in Genesis 2--3, and he suggests that the garden of Eden was reminiscent of the Solomonic royal park, that the serpent could be connected with a serpent cult in Jerusalem which was later abolished by Hezekiah (2 Kgs 18.4), and that the cherubim guarding the garden of Eden could be an allusion to the cherubim in the temple which protected the ark. We could add that the tradition in Ezek. 28.1119 which in many respects is so similar to Genesis 3 is also concerned with a royal figure. Given these royal allusioru:, Wittenberg reads Genesis 2-3 as an attack upon the reign of Solomon. Adam is a royal figure whose undoing results from his desire to know good and evil apart from God. The reign of Solomon resulted in a royal reorganization of the whole society, which brought great hardship upon the people and the break-down of society as it had been previously organized. Just as in Genesis 2-11 the 'fall' of Adam had brought about an increase in violence, with Cain killing Abel and Lamech exacting vengeance far in excess of

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his grievance, so the desire of Solomon to determine what was right led to violence and to the loss of social cohesion. Wittenberg argues further that the genealogies in Genesis 10 emphasize socio-econom'ic differences between prosperous cities such as Erech (Uruk), Accad (Agade), and Nineveh, cities that belonged to the list of Ham, and the tribal societies that belonged to the list of Shem. Thus the lists contrast the centralized city states with the de-centralized tribal peoples. The standpoint of the J writer is that of the tribal peoples. whereas Solomon, contrary to the traditions of his people, created a centralized state. The story of the tower of Babel is an attack upon the building activity of Solomon, with the king wanting to create a reputation by his great building works. The only result of this was to place such a strain upon his kingdom that it divided after his death in the same way that the building of the tower of Babel resulted in the division of the people. Wittenberg isolates a strand in Genesis 1-11 which is critical of the centralization and the misuse of power. He assigns special importance to this strand for Christian usage by claiming that, 'in the crucified Jesus the resistance theology of the Solomonic age received its ultimate vindication' (p. 17). Louise Schottroff (1988, pp. 8-26) gives a social-historical reading of Gen. 1.1-2.4a, placing the account in the· presumed situation of the deported Jewish farmers and craftsmen living in exile in Babylon after the fall of Jerusalem in 587 BeE. She assumes the correctness of the account of the circumstances of the Jews as worked out by W. Schottroff (1983, pp. 122-28), according to which the deported craftsmen had no chance to pass on their skills to their families, and where some Jews were enslaved to rich families. Believing that the social setting of the text is a clue to its meaning, she notes that Genesis 1 describes God as a craftsman fashioning the world. She also notes that God is depicted both as a mother bird and as a sovereign king. Schottroff next contrasts the beauty of the original creation with the polluted and threatened world we live in today. She contraats our experience of the creation story with that of its original readers. For them, in their oppression and hopelessness. the story of creation gave them faith in their

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Genesis 1-11

God who had created so much beauty. No one could take from them the contemplation of that beauty. The verses about huma~ind's being created in the ~mage of hod (Gen. 1.26-27) produce two comments. For the original (~aders, the exiled Jews, these verses gave hope. In their exile they had no value in the eyes of their overlords other than their economic value. But their sacred traditions assured them that they were made in God's image, and that gave them incomparable value. Schottroff illustrates this with a charming story about Hillel, who, in going to bathe, noted that, since the statues (images) of the Caesars were regularly washed, he also needed to wash. He was greater than a Caesar because he was made in the image of God. For contemporary readers, the question provoked by Gen. 1.26-30 is 'are we going to live as those made in the image of God, or as a race of superhumans?' If the answer is in favour of the former, this wiU require more than the banishing of environmentally harmful products from our kitchens! Schottroff's exposition of the relation between man and woman in Gen. 1.26-30 brings us close to a hermeneutics of rejection, that is, a reading which questions the assumptions of the text. She argues that, among the exiles, to have many children was an aspect of liberation by ensuring the continuance of the people and increasing their economic strength. She rejects interpretations of humankind's being made in God's image such as that in 1 Cor. 11.7 according to which only man is the image and glory of God and the woman is related to God only via man. She is also critical of Barth's views that man and woman constitute the divine image in their relationship to each other. This simply sanctions male views of marriage together with their disadvantages to women. Schottroff prefers to interpret language about the image of God as a summons to men and women to work together in equality and justice. But she also feels that the female experience of oppression that this text has caused and sanctioned will enable women to work aU the more effectively for the alleviation of every kind of injustice. It is here that we are close to a hermeneutics of rejection, in the sense that the negative effect of the text upon women can be put to positive use. Because the text has been misused in the past to the detriment of women, it

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needs to be women who assist to understand and use the text appropriately today. The third example of a liberation reading of part of Genesis 1-11 is Boesak's treatment'of Genesis 4. as presented by West (1990, pp.279-99). Boesak is well known in the West as a leading South Mrican churchman who is engaged in the struggle against apartheid. His reading of Genesis 4 is thus deeply affected by the situation in which he works, and by his belief that the text tells a universal story applicable to all ages: The story oC Cain and Abel is a story about two types or kinds oC people. It is a very human story that is still being enacted today, This story does not tell us in the first place what happened once upon a time; rather. it tells us about something that happens today. Because this story is a human story. we find very human elements in it and elements Crom our own human history (West, p.285).

From this standpoint Boesak gives an essentially literary reading of Genesis 4. He notes the repetiton of the word 'brother' in the story of Cain and Abel (vv. 2, 8 [twice], 9 [twice], 10 and 11) as a way of emphasizing the wickedness of Cain's actions. He has killed the human being closest to him and has thereby essentially denied his own humanity, since humanity is a co-operative venture. Cain's punishment is that he is alienated from the land on which he relied for a living (he was a tiller of the ground) and is forced to wander without rest and without a goal. The continuation of the story in vv. 23-24, where Lamech, Cain's descendant, boasts that he has killed a man for wounding him, shows that as history moves on humans learn nothing, and things do not change. We can add that this might be a justification for the way in which Boesak applies the story universally. However, the story does not end in complete darkness. Gen. 4.25-26 records the birth of a son to Adam and Eve to replace the murdered Abel, and the chapter ends with the words, 'At that time men began to call upon the name of the Lord'. Boesak comments: After murder. after death, after annihilation and inhumanity. God begins again (West, p. 284).

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I shall not comment on the way in which Boesak draws parallels between the anxieties experienced by Cain after he has murdered Abel and the an'{ietiesJJoesak believes are experienced by those he regards as oppressors in our co.ntemporary world. Whatever one's views on this matter, it is not difficult to see how Boesak's reading can bring hope to people who are being oppressed. The text makes it clear that the oppression of human beings by other human beings is not God's plan for the world, that God pronounces judgment against it, but that he is also at work to bring hope throu~h those who honour his name. Whereas Clines's literary reading is concerned to bring readers into 'the world of the text', there to find the values of their own world challenged, Boesak sees the text as referring to concrete situations in our own world, and is saying to his own people that the oppression they suffer is condemned by God, but that he is even now at work to make things new. Mosala's reading of the story of Cain and Abel (West, pp. 287ff.) is very different from that of Boesak. He begins from a hermeneutics of suspicion, that is, he does not take the text at its face value but looks behind it to discover its origins within the class struggle in ancient Israel. Such research indicates that Genesis 4 comes from the hand of the ruling class, and that its historical background is the Davidic monarchy, during which there was a relentless dispossession of Israelite village peasants from their lands. Given this setting, the text seeks to justify this dispossession by identifying the peasants with·Cain, whose offering God rejected. The idea of the offering to God is a reminder that the village peasants were required to pay crippling tribute to the ruling classes. The death of Abel may well mask a case of successful resistance by a peasant against an attempt of a more wealthy man to appropriate his family lands. That such attempts at appropriation were made is clear from the story of Naboth's vineyard (1 Kgs 21). Mosala admits that his reading is not immediately obvious to the reader. It requires a reading that issues out of a firm grounding in the struggle for liberation, as well as a basis in critical theoretical perspectives which can expose the deep structure of the text (Mosala, cited by West, p.288).

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Basic to his position is his belief that texts which originate from the class of the oppressors cannot be used in the struggle for liberation. If they are,• they may undergird the interests of t the oppressors even though they are being used by the oppressed. 'Oppressive texts cannot be totally tamed or subverted into liberative texts' (West, p. 293). Thus read, the biblical text ceases to be an end in itself. It becomes a means to an end, which is to help to reconstruct a history of class struggle with which the oppressed can identify. Further. it makes possible the necessary unmasking both of the oppressive nature of biblical texts and of their interpretation within a Church and an academic community which have represented. and still represent, the interests of elites rather than of oppressed people. While this may sound very strange to those of us who are indeed students of the Bible from within a privileged rather than an oppressed situation, we cannot overlook the intense sincerity of Mosala's position, and reflect that. if we were in the same position, what he is saying might not sound quite so strange. 4. Feminist readings

Feminist readings of the Bible are as diverse as liberation readings. They can range from readings designed to bring out hitherto unnoticed facets of the text, to readings which are similar in their aims and execution to the hermeneutics of suspicion or rejection which we noted above in the work of Mosala and Schottroff (see further Collins, 1985). A femi~ist reading of Genesis 2-3 that has become a classic is that of Trible (1978). It is essentially a literary reading with structuralist undertones and it is executed with skill and sensitivity that cannot be adequately conveyed in a brief summary. From a feminist standpoint. its aim is to combat a number of misogynist readings which have 'acquired the status of canonicity', including the view that man is superior to woman for the following reasons: he is created first, the woman is made from the man's rib to be his helper, she is named by the man, is responsible for his downfall. is punished by childbirth because of her greater sin. and in her. desire for her husband is to be submissive to him. Trible's strategy is to provide a reading

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which rebuts all of these arguments; the following summary will concentrate upon the alternative reading which she offers. \ ., Gen. 2.5 states, in the standard translations, that there was no man to till the ground. On the basis of the pun in v. 7 on the Hebrew words 'adam (man) and >tJdama (earth), Trible renders the Hebrew 'adam as 'earth-creature' and maintains that it is 'neither male or female nor a combination of both' (p.98). It is God who, unilaterally, decides that the earthcreature needs an 'ezer, a Hebrew. word that here denotes a companio:n 'who is neither subordinate or superior; one who alleviates isolation through identity' (p. 90). Whereas birds and animals were created from the dust of the earth (2.19), the